The Art of the Critique

Sometimes there’s something that’s just so good in the Church Marketing Lab that it needs to migrate to our front page here. This is one of those occasions.

User “wiseacre photo” has written up a piece called “The Art of the Critique.” It aims to be a guide for churches hiring designers to critique their work in its early stages. It succeeds at being much more. It can expand from graphic design to employee reviews to volunteer encouragement to pastoral critique. And beyond. Here’s a taste of what he says, but you can read the whole article in our Church Marketing Lab.

He has four basic rules for your critique.

Know the client parameters of the design.

Open with what you like about the design.

Explain what and how you’d improve the design, not what you don’t like.

Joshua Cody

Josh Cody served as our associate editor for several years before moving on to bigger things. Like Texas. These days he lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, and you can find him online or on Twitter when he's not wrestling code.

One Response to “The Art of the Critique”

I like this article. Very good rule-of-thumb for designers. I have found that it gets to the point where the hardest thing to do when critiquing, is to find the good in a composition without personal stylistic bias’.
The easiest thing to do is to point out the bad.